To all the change-makers around the world,

We introduce you the Open Source University project at www.os.university in which we invite you to join. It brings the future of Academia close to what it was initially intended to be and what the term ‘’university’’ stands for — a community.

Now, more than ever before, we need to take action to re-engineer a thousand years old system. The 4th industrial revolution is erasing entire industries, creating instant demand for new skills. In the same time, it takes up to 4 years for a new academic program to move from concept to production. Even when it finally does, millions are being left behind with higher education coverage in large economies such as India and Brazil, world’s 2nd and 5th most populated nations, as low as 15%. Where access is distributed broadly, debt is piling up — 1.3 trillion dollars in the United States only. It is no wonder that such a model is not sustainable any longer. More than 25,000 higher education institutions are starting to loose relevance, facing competition from hundreds of alternative providers online, while companies are struggling to find a scalable project to organize the ocean of learning opportunities and bridge the gaps in an educational market, worth trillions of dollars.

Here is where we come. With the help of our decentralized educational platform, already 2 years in research, recognized as one of world’s top 10 social innovation projects by the Living Progress Challenge, we harness the power of the decentralized blockchain to address what “Ernst & Young” found to be “the main bottleneck in matching skills to jobs” — information coordination relationships between academia, learns, and businesses. Through the Open Source University platform:

– Universities and other learning providers will easily populate their course and program offerings into the blockchain, making their knowledge production scalable.

– Learners will be able to record and store progress directly into the blockchain, using smart contracts to verify and showcase their accomplishments on a global stage.

– Businesses will have direct access to the greatest pool of talents possible, while big data will enable them to target the right candidates and meet the learning and development needs of current employees through customized learning pathways on-demand.

All transactions along the way will be enabled though our EDU token, turning the Open Source University project in worlds’ biggest educational marketplace where transactional costs are brought down to zero and geographic, socioeconomic and institutional borders simply don’t apply. Starting with 60+ million learners, enrolled in more than 7000 massive open online courses, our solution has the potential to reach up to 3 billion Internet users across the world.

With the blockchain-based Open Source University platform, we are launching on the global stage what academic institutions, such as the Open University, and corporations, such as Sony, are already testing. To those that every second counts, and every development opportunity matters, we send our call to action. Because human capital, despite it accounts for two thirds of total global wealth, and being the biggest driver of growth worldwide, is still far below its potential.

To us, unfulfilled potential — of learners, educators, and businesses, is the biggest and most urgent global challenge to address. We want to address it together — through the open source blockchain, in a decentralized way, because we believe in what the founder of Linux once said:

In a real open source world, you have the right to control your own destiny.

Join us at www.os.university and subscribe for our newsletter in order not to miss the upcoming ICO of the first global academic and career development ledger.